Advantages of Software Confederations: Consequences for the CEO

Let us give the list of advantages of software confederations following from the above discussed facts.

  1. Software confederation can be developed incrementally via adding new autonomous components.

  2. Some components can be outsourced. The outsourcing can be easily revoked.

  3. The confederation can be easily adapted to the current organizational structure of the enterprise using it. The confederation supports changes to modern organization structures. It should be the aim of CEO to promote such positive changes.

  4. Software confederation is the only feasible solution of the support of many managerial problems and/or activities like company splitting, forming coalitions of vendors, selling of organizational sub-units, acquisition of firms, the use of analytical tools of third parties, etc. The software confederations are able to support modern decentralized organizational structures and support vertical as well as horizontal links and collaborations. The resulting structure is not merely the flattened original one neither it is reduced in another way (see Figure 5).


    Figure 5: Changes of organizational structures

  5. SWC can well support modern management practices and activities like CRM, SCM, etc.

The CEO, therefore, should require software systems to be confederated as a crucial precondition of modern management practices and techniques. The influence of the technology on the properties of the software systems is critical. Note that systems provided by many software vendors are invisibly confederated.

On the other hand, the advantages of the software confederations can be fully used up only in the case when the structure of the enterprise is decentralized and flexible and allows the autonomy of organizational sub-units and the vertical as well as horizontal variants of cooperation.

The use of software confederations changes substantially the tasks of CIO as well. In order to explain it, we must discuss some further technical details.



Managing Globally with Information Technology
Managing Globally with Information Technology
ISBN: 193177742X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 224

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